94% funded, and I still have a year to go

The night it clicked

In 2023 we went to Europe, and I did something that felt, at the time, slightly ridiculous.

I booked four nights at a Holiday Inn in Naples using about 44,000 Qantas Points. No money. Just points I'd accumulated without really trying.

And separately, using CommBank Awards points — from a sign-up bonus and a couple of years of ordinary spending — I got $900 off our Emirates flights for me and my husband. Back then you could convert CommBank points into a Flight Centre voucher, and Flight Centre could put that against almost anything.

Standing in that hotel room in Naples, it properly landed: this isn't a thing for people who fly business class for work. It's a thing for people who buy groceries.

That was the moment I started taking points seriously. Everything since has been built on it.

What 456,600 points actually buys

The goal is a Qantas Classic Flight Reward — a round-the-world style itinerary that takes us from Sydney through Asia into Europe, across to Malta, and home again.

Malta is the point of the whole thing. My parents live in Europe, and I want my children to actually spend time in my home country rather than visiting it for a fortnight. The plan is to go while I'm on maternity leave, so we can stay long enough for it to mean something.

The maths:

• Three paying passengers — me, my husband, and our son, who'll be four by then. Once a child turns two they need their own seat and their own full points allocation.
• One lap infant — we're planning for four by then. A child under two travels as a lap infant, so they don't need a points allocation, just taxes.
• About 152,200 points each, economy, for the full itinerary.

That's 456,600 points. I'm currently at 429,875.

One small thing worth knowing: booking a Classic Reward over the phone rather than online adds a service fee per passenger. On a booking this size that's thousands of points I'd rather keep.

The full ledger

I don't think there's much point writing about this unless I show the actual numbers, so here they are.

Qantas Points balance breakdown as at July 2026

Source	Qantas Points
Opening balance (April 2026)	83,291
CommBank Ultimate Awards transfers	+236,217
Westpac Altitude, incl. sign-up bonus	+96,964
Everyday earn (groceries, insurance, retail)	+13,403
Balance	429,875

Two of those lines did almost all the work, and both landed within a few weeks of each other — the CommBank transfer in June, the Westpac bonus in July. Watching the balance jump like that was genuinely surreal. Three years of slow accumulation, and then suddenly it was nearly done.

Where the points came from, by category

This is the breakdown from my actual Qantas activity statement for the past twelve months, and it surprised me more than I expected:

Qantas Points earned by category, July 2025 to July 2026

Category	Points	Share
Credit cards	333,181	84%
Everyday shopping (Woolworths)	34,000	9%
Retail & lifestyle	19,955	5%
Insurance & wellbeing	7,926	2%
Hotels & car	1,447	<1%

Here's the honest caveat, and it matters: this twelve-month window contains two enormous one-off events. Three years of accumulated CommBank points landed in a single transfer in June, and a credit card sign-up bonus landed in July. Neither of those is a normal month.

If you stripped those two events out, the split would look completely different — and much more like steady everyday earning. So please don't read 84% as "credit cards are 84% of points forever." Read it as "two big card events can reshape a balance overnight."

I'll have cleaner numbers from here. Both cards now transfer to Qantas automatically at the end of each month, which they didn't before, so future months will show what ordinary earning actually looks like rather than three years arriving at once.

The other thing worth saying: the cards only worked because we pay them off in full, and because we were already spending that money on groceries, bills and insurance. The card didn't create the spending. It caught points on spending that was happening anyway.

Why I sat on 230,000 points for years

The CommBank points are the interesting part of this story.

We have a CommBank Ultimate Awards card, shared between me and my husband, so we both earn on it. It's been accumulating since 2023.

I deliberately didn't convert any of it, for two reasons.

First, the fee. To send CommBank Awards points to Qantas you have to opt in to something called Qantas Frequent Flyer Direct, which costs $90 a year, per card, non-refundable, charged again every year on the anniversary. I didn't want to pay that when the Flight Centre voucher route was doing the job for free.

Second, I wanted to see how big it could get. I knew we'd go back to Europe eventually. So I let it build, and watched.

Then in October 2025 CommBank changed everything. They removed fourteen international transfer partners — Emirates, KrisFlyer, Cathay, Etihad and more — and they killed the Flight Centre redemption entirely. Suddenly the only routes out were Velocity, or Qantas via that $90 opt-in.

So I paid the $90 and moved everything across, at a rate of 2.5 CommBank Awards points to 1 Qantas Point.

Honestly? I'd been putting it off, and then the decision got made for me. Which brings me to the lesson:

If I did it again, I'd move points into an airline program sooner rather than hoarding them somewhere a bank controls. The flexibility I thought I was preserving turned out to be borrowed.

Where the points actually come from

People assume a balance this size means constant flying. We've barely flown.

Almost all of it came from the ground:

• Groceries — the single most consistent earner
• Health insurance
• The electricity bill
• The Qantas Wellbeing app — genuinely free points for walking around
• Two credit cards — CommBank Ultimate Awards, and more recently a Westpac Altitude card, which transfers to Qantas automatically with no separate opt-in fee

None of it is exciting. That's rather the point.

How I'd start from zero today

If you're reading this with no points and no idea where to begin, here's what I'd actually tell you — and it's the opposite of what most points content says.

Don't start with a credit card. Start with what you already spend.

1. Pick the supermarket you already go to. Are you a Woolworths person or a Coles person? Don't change your life for points. Work with the habits you have.
2. Set up that one loyalty program properly. If it's Woolworths, join Everyday Rewards and link everything in the background — Big W and BWS both earn on the same account.
3. Turn on automatic conversion. This is the step people skip. Set Everyday Rewards to convert to Qantas Points and it happens by itself: every 2,000 Everyday Rewards points becomes 1,000 Qantas Points, automatically. No remembering, no logging in.
4. Only then add the next thing. Once that's running without you thinking about it, add Flybuys for the times you're at Coles, Kmart or Target. Link it, automate it, forget it.
5. Consider a credit card last, and only if it suits you. Cards earn the most by a long way. They're also where people get hurt.

The principle underneath all of it: one system at a time, fully automated, before you add another. I promise this beats trying to run six programs badly.

The mistakes I made

I tried to copy the Americans

When I started I read everything I could find, and most of it was American. Their credit cards are different, their programs are different, the whole structure is different. A lot of that advice simply doesn't translate to Australia, and I wasted months trying to make it fit.

Find an Australian creator whose approach matches how you actually live, and take pieces from them.

I tried to do everything at once

In the beginning I signed up for far too much simultaneously and ended up managing nothing properly.

Something worth remembering when you read anyone's points content, including mine: the people giving advice have usually been at this for years and have it all automated. You're seeing the finished system, not the three years of fumbling that built it. Don't try to arrive where they are on day one.

The credit card thing, honestly

I was nervous about credit cards for a long time, and I think that nervousness was reasonable.

We've been careful — we pay the card off in full, every month. But we've slipped once or twice, missed the due date by mistake, and been charged interest. It wasn't catastrophic, but it was a reminder of how fast the maths turns against you.

Interest rates on rewards cards are high. If you carry a balance, the interest will comfortably exceed the value of any points you earn, and you will have paid for the privilege of going backwards. There's also a detail people miss: with some cards you don't earn points at all if you haven't paid the minimum in full and on time.

So: cards are the fastest route, and they're not for everyone. Be honest with yourself about which you are.

Don't let them expire

Worth knowing, because losing a balance to inactivity would be devastating:

• Qantas Points expire after 18 months with no earning or redeeming activity. Family transfers and Qantas Business Rewards transfers don't count as activity.
• Velocity Points expire after 24 months of inactivity — and once gone, they're forfeited and can't be reinstated.
• Flybuys is the strictest at 12 months.

The good news is that the automation I described above solves this by itself. If Everyday Rewards is converting to Qantas, your account is never inactive. Same with Flybuys converting to Velocity. Set it up once and the expiry problem quietly disappears.

Still worth checking your balance occasionally anyway.

So what happens to the leftovers?

This is the bit I genuinely haven't decided.

Everything I earn from here is surplus to the economy tickets. So the question becomes: what's it actually for?

• Upgrade someone to business? A single business seat to Europe costs more than the surplus I'm likely to have, so at best it's one leg, or one person.
• Put it toward accommodation? Which is what started all this, back in Naples.
• Save it for Fiji? My husband is Fijian, and we'll be going at some point. Maybe the smarter move is not spending it at all.

I don't know yet. I'll write about it when I do.

Questions I get asked

Building a balance too? Tell me what you're saving for.